Talking to Strangers
by lesilec
Summary: I'm gonna start working on this again. I left it kinda unfinished. :: SqueeDevi ish.::
1. Six years

She paces, alone in her room

Asking questions to an uncaring menagerie

The faces on the walls

The empty bottles, scattered across the floor

The telephone, ringing ceaselessly, day and night

The question, the answer

The rivers falling from her face

All forgotten

All gone

All alone

She paces


	2. Welcome home

Holy shitpies. I've written something.

This is meant to be a more climactic end to Things I Don't Need, but you don't really need to read it to understand this. One-shot angsty pseudo-philosophical stuff. I may write another chapter or two to clear some things up, but I need to stop writing Johnny for awhile...he's quite a downer.

Thanks to da peoples who reviewed TIDN!

---silec

* * *

She was curious. That was all. That and nothing more had brought her there that night. It was not that she had remembered him, or that sugar-coated, long lost love had drawn her heart to that one place and time, it was only that she had had a memory, and was curious.

And it wasn't a memory, so much, as it was a memory of a memory. A faint residue in her mind. She didn't know when it had happened, or why she started to feel so odd when she added up the total on the cash register. First printing hardcover. Seven dollars and seventy-seven cents.

Winter had come earlier than it should have. So while most of the trees still kept their leaves, it was cold. Her car was shit. No heating vents, no insulated seat cushions. The fucking windows were broken, too, so she could see her breath over the steering wheel. The urban sky was starless and orange-black by the time she got there.

While the other houses in the neighborhood looked normal enough, this one was more than a little strange. The windows were boarded up, and the sidewalk leading up to the front door was stained with a rusty trail. Devi hugged her coat to her chest and sat on the roof of her car. She closed her eyes, trying to remember. She could see herself walking up that sidewalk and going through a doorway that once did not have a large two-by-four nailed across it. She could hear the smooth slide of metal against clothing. A sinking feeling in her stomach. But nothing else.

There came a scraping sound from a house next door. Somebody had opened up a window on the second floor. A blinding fluorescent lamp turned on in the room, flooding the dark sidewalk with bright light. A dim silhouette of a person was revealed. It stared at Devi, then waved at her, slow and suspicious. She waved back.

The shadow whipped away from the window and slammed it shut. A few seconds later, it stepped from the house. The porch lights flicked on.

"You don't live here. You shouldn't be here," he said. He was a teenager, as far as Devi could tell. His voiced wavered, possibly in fear, possibly in the face of looming, impending puberty. His face and bare shins were becoming red from the frigid air. "You really have to leave."

She looked at the boy for a moment, pondering his request, and chose to ignore him. She turned her attention back to number seven seven seven, uncaring, unblinking. He walked further from his home, leaving the door open. Flickering blue images were reflected upon the otherwise unlit walls inside.

"Listen to me, you have to go now. Please?" The boy stopped just a few feet from Devi's car. She held her chin between her fingers and let out a long, wispy breath.

"Do you know who lives here, kid?" she asked, still not looking back at him.

"Nobody lives there anymore. Everyone says that it's all safe now, but you can't trust them, no, no." Devi glanced at him and noticed with horror that his eyes had expanded to the size of dinner plates.

"What do you mean?"

"There used to be this scary man that lived there..." he whispered in a shrieking voice. "And I think maybe there might still be some horrible things in there..." His freakishly huge eyes darted left, then right. "Like politicians, and moose, and sponges, and rabies...and probably some other stuff, too. It's not safe." The corners of his face strained. "Please go," he pleaded.

Devi smiled. She liked this boy. It would be fun, she thought, to take him to see a Japanese horror film some day. "I can't go just yet."

She brushed her hair, blue for now, away from her eyes. Everyone had been telling her lately that she was an adult now, and that she had to keep a serious appearance. To buy herself a moderately priced SUV and a pair of loose, comfortable jeans and learn to act like one. Eventually she would have to accept that there was no longer anyone who truly appreciated her company. And on that day she would be likely to put a gun to her head.

Devi searched the boy's face, still begging her, though she wasn't listening. There was a person underneath the oily skin and bone. But she couldn't see that boy. She could only tell that he had fear enough for the both of them. And she came to a realization.

Everybody leaves. No one ever stays long enough to let you really see them, or for them to see you. You can spend your life with them and only know what they want you to.

But inside every deceiving, over-emotional sack of meat, there was a person. She could see the one inside the boarded up windows, past the glinting metal and the smell of copper on her boots. She could see a starry night a long, long time ago.

"What did you say your name was?" she asked.

"I...I didn't. My name is, um...Squee." Devi nodded. She touched his fingertips with her own.

"Well, Squee, I think I'm ready to leave." He got up from his seat on the trunk and brushed off his shorts. "Why did you come here, anyway?"

It took her a few minutes to answer. "I had a good friend that used to live here."

Squee peered at Devi from his porch. Just before shutting the door, he replied, "So did I."


	3. So very sad

Sometimes it's hard to be a woman

Giving all your love to just one man

And if you love him

Oh, be proud of him

'Cause after all he's just a man

* * *

Fuckers. All of them, fuckers. There were some people that were placed upon the Earth solely to be pains in the ass. Because why else would they do this to her? Why?

She just wanted some time off to paint. The needle-in-the-brain headaches had come back, and she needed to relax a bit until they wore off. They'd come and gone for what seemed like forever so much so that she'd long forgotten the first time they arrived, during her short-lived period as a freelance artist for Nerve. But no, they'd said, out of the question. The latest edition of Larry Fodder and his Vaguely Amusing Magical Exploits was almost out, and they needed her cash register-opening prowess for the hordes of small children that were destined to arrive in a zombie-like fervor.

After working at that place for a total of the nine worst years of her life, and even crawling back to them on hands and knees, wasn't she owed the least amount of sympathy? Shouldn't they at least give half a damn about her?

She had nearly resigned to their whims yet again. But an epiphany struck her. There was nothing keeping her there. There were some glass doors and a few misguided souls that could try, but nothing would be able to keep her from simply getting up in the middle of a transaction and opening the door.

She herself was the most surprised upon leaving the building when she realized that the world was open to her. It was as if some invisible threads had been cut from her puppet hands. Hands that had been tightly fastened to the register and the clock for so very long, that she had no idea what to do with them. And the dull synapses brought the thought into her head that she wouldn't be able to paint anymore. Not after so long. Her fingers couldn't remember how to hold the brush anymore. When was the last time, she wondered, that she had been in her drawing room to do anything other than lament? When was the last time she had seen the color of a canvas?

But where else could she go? In holding on to one hope for years, all of her other desires had given up in favor of devoting more to Devi's constant worknowthinklater psyche. So what was she now other than an artist who'd lost their art?

She got in her car and started it. The engine sputtered. Too cold out. The gas was frozen. Didn't matter. She jerked the key again. Nothing. She banged a fist hard against the dashboard, and still nothing. She jostled the key back and forth for several minutes. The car finally gave a response, however weak, and she slammed her foot down.

Devi drove as fast as her own reflexes would allow without any real idea of where she was going. Some fuckwad on a moped cut her off at a yellow light and it was all she could do to keep from running his metallic blue ass over. Going sixty on a residential sidestreet, she pondered a visit to Tenna or another old acquaintance, as if they'd want to see her. As if she'd even care what they had to say.

That nice little boy, from the other night. She could drop by on a friendly visit, while hopefully not coming across as hideously desperate for human interaction. Try to figure out what anything in that strange, strange neighborhood meant.

She slowed to a stop in front of the boarded up building. It was noon. The sky was cold and red, with the glaring sun high above. She saw that copper walkway and hesitated a moment before shutting off the ignition and getting out.

She walked to the doorway and smoothed her hand over the jagged wood a few times, gliding over a misused doorbell. As she did this Devi became aware of another presence beside her, watching quietly.

"Your name was Squee," she said, still stroking a portion of wood with her hand. "It was Squee, and mine was Devi."

He didn't wait long to jump right into it. "I went in there last night." This seemed interesting to her, but she didn't show it. Her arm had moved to the small plastic button. She pressed it lightly, but there was no response. "Did you, now? What did you find, then?"

Squee sat down on the raised concrete step leading into the front door and began tracing circles into the sparkling cement. "I don't know. I'm not really sure yet, but...there was lots of wood and nails. And it smelled kind of gross. Like somebody got sick all over the place or something." Devi looked at him. He sat with hunched shoulders, avoiding her gaze.

"That's all?" Her nightmares had recently been the subject of whatever new ideas her mind could conjure up concerning the house. She was more than a little relieved. "That's all. Are you sure?"

Squee's back bent into a further arch. "No...no, not really." He looked up at her. "I found this room. In the basement. Really really far down. There was this big door. And there was a painting. Of a girl." He was deep in thought for a second.

"The walls...they were all brown. Brown and red, and all so shiny. And the girl in the painting was crying. She looked so sad, Devi." He gripped his hands together tightly. "She was just so sad."

Devi slipped down to a sitting position next to Squee. "Did you go through the door?" she asked. He shook his head. "I was too scared."

"I was waiting...hoping...that you would come back. So that maybe you could help me?" Devi smiled and took his hand.

"Is that what you thought?" she asked. Squee nodded and looked away. She peered between the boards nailed across the door into the infinite abyss.

Do I have anything better to do? she wondered.


End file.
